Steph & Ayesha Curry Turn School Bus Into Pantry & Bookstore For Oakland Kids

Steph and Ayesha Curry are giving back in a big way

The brightly-colored behemoth that rolled up to an East Oakland elementary school this week was no ordinary school bus. NBA Superstar Steph Curry and his wife Ayesha (and entrepreneur and restauranteur in her own right) rolled out the “Eat. Learn. Play.” bus. It’s all a part of their charitable foundation of the same name, it is awesome.

The amazing bus — painted in technicolor shades of pink, blue, and yellow — is a little bit of everything. It’s part food pantry, part free library, and it also just happens to be tricked out with flat-screen TVs, a rooftop deck, and of course, a basketball hoop. It’s all meant to help underserved kids in the area, whether they need more food to eat, help with reading, or just a safe place to hang out.

“This idea came basically from me wanting to find a way to eradicate food deserts within the Oakland area,” Ayesha Curry said, per NBC News. “At first, the idea was around, ‘How can we find locations where people can come and pick up fresh produce and other things for their families?’ Logistically, especially with Covid, that idea started to seem far-fetched.”

The bus proved to be the perfect solution to those logistical issues, and beyond that, Curry also said she hoped it would get kids genuinely excited to use it. “We wanted to make it colorful and have all the hydraulics and antics to have that feeling like when you’re a kid and the ice cream truck would come driving down the street,” she said in Forbes.

Curry said she was inspired to do something like this after seeing the disparities in literacy rates for Black and Latinx students in the Oakland school district. Instead of blaming schools or parents, she wanted to tackle it from a different perspective. “It’s a community issue. Let’s get together, give this model a try and see if we can create some excitement around reading. If we can all join together and try to fix the issue together and turn these numbers around, then I think we’re doing something right.”

The Currys have even bigger plans for the bus as well — eventually, the foundation hopes to use it as a health clinic, hold cooking demonstrations (Ayesha does have multiple cookbooks under her belt, after all), and even hold sports clinics (I wonder who they get could to teach basketball…?).

There are so many ambitious plans for the bus and the foundation, and it’s absolutely amazing that the Currys are tackling so much. It could make a huge impact in the lives of Oakland kids, whether they’re grabbing a free meal or a free book — or just shooting some hoops.